The story of Jews hiding their
children from Jesus
in an oven, and how Jesus turned
them into pigs:
The sense of danger posed by Jews—linked so frequently to the utter vulnerability of children to any adult malefactors—was represented in a northern tale about Jews, children and ovens. In the French version of the Gospel of Christ's childhood, L'Evangile de Enfaunce de Jesu Christ, which appears in the later thirteenth century, the story of Christ's infancy was made up of apocryphal material in Latin, based on the Greek (pseudo-)gospel of Mark, and formed into a version of His early life, containing interesting and otherwise absent details of Christ's infancy. Among the thirty tales is a story of the Children in the Oven. In Jericho, Jewish parents intervened to prevent their children from playing with the boy Jesus by hiding them away in an oven. When Christ came to look for his playmates and asked what was in the oven, he was told that these were 'pigs', to which he answered 'Let them be pigs' ('Pors soient, puiz que cy sont miz') and the children turned into pigs and ran away from their parents. The English illustrated Holkham Bible of c.1327 attaches a miniature to this tale, and one which resembles closely the scences of the Jewish Boy: Jewish children put by parents into a dark forbidding oven.
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Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault
on Late Medieval Jews (2004) By
Miri Rubi
